Comment by tshaddox

My point is more about the possibility that a big chunk of future cash flow is entirely independent of engineering work, at least for some reasonable bounds for what constitutes "engineering work" (e.g. you could argue that an engineer ought to judge whether their time is better spent cold calling potential clients or finding office space to rent, but those I would call "out of bounds"). Any easy example to illustrate this would be two engineers who each develop a functionally identical app for two different startups, but at one startup the founder later embezzles company funds, gets arrested, and the whole company falls apart, while the other company goes on to be successful. Was one engineer really more productive than the other in any meaningful sense?